South Dakota

Electric
Overview

• The 2001 Legislative Session in South Dakota ended without any activity on electric restructuring. The South Dakota Public Utilities Commission is continuing to monitor the happenings in other states and, at this point, seems comfortable in not having any formal deregulation or restructuring activity.
• A study by the University of South Dakota, sponsored by the state's rural electric cooperatives, found that electric industry restructuring was not in the interest of most customers in the state. There are few industrial customers in the state, and even these have not pushed aggressively for electric industry restructuring.

Natural Gas
Overview

• Unbundled natural gas service is available for some residential customers, but the lack of marketer participation in South Dakota makes it generally impractical for most. Transportation service, with no minimum volume requirements, has been available to all customers of two of South Dakota's three major local distribution companies (LDCs) since the mid-1990s. However, of the dozen or so marketers active in South Dakota, few, if any, have found it economic to enter the residential market.
• Also few, if any, residential customers have arranged for separate transportation service because of the difficulties involved, such as telemetering costs and nomination requirements.
• The two distributors that offer transportation service with no minimum volume requirements are MidAmerican Energy Company and NorthWestern Public Service. Montana-Dakota Utilities also offers transportation service, but the minimum requirement of 2.5 million Btu per hour makes it impractical for residential and other small-volume customers.

Consumer advocate
Attorney General
Consumer Protection Division
www.state.sd.us/attorney/divisions/consumer/index.htm